LULL IN THE PACIFIC

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 55, 20 May 1942, Page 4

LULL IN THE PACIFIC

THE cessation of large scale hostilities in should not lead us into the folly of surmising that the great naval battle in the Coral Sea had succeeded in removing the threat to our land. Experts tell us that a vast Japanese army is vecouperating and resting after its victorious envelopment of the Dutch East Indian Empire and the British possessions in Malay. It is for us to surmise that invasion will comc: that it is inevitable and that we must be prepared to meet it with all the strength at our disposal. Should, by any chance of fate, it not develop, we shall at least have dor.c. our duty by ourselves and our families. This is the attitude taken up by General Mac Arthur, commander of the newly created Anzac War Zone, who in a statement to the press recently declared that, even had all the transports in the Coral Sea battle'been lost, they would have constituted, but a 1! infinitismal portion of the Japanese invasion armies awaiting but the signal to advance. War is at hand, even though its thunder has died down and comparative quiet now reigns. A mental picture of New Guinea, Timor, Sumatra and the other Dutch possessions now under Japanese control will provide us with the truth of the sudden enlargement of the militant Nipponese empire. It is now at our very doors —awaiting but the time and the opportunity to strike. To-day we are a front line country and it would be sadly to our detriment to deny it. The Japanese Eastern Pacific army is destined for a single purpose but whether it will be able to fulfill that purpose relies greatly upon firstly the strength of the Allied fleets, and secondly upon ourselves. The decline of war news from the Anzac quarter must not be allowed to lull us back into a false sense of security. That at the present time would be fatal. The splatter of raiding machine guns on New Guinea bases constitute the only sounds of actual war that shatter the sinister calm. But we are alert and waiting and should our testing time ever come, we can be relied upon to give an account of ourselves w f orthy of our pioneer forbears and the trust which they have bequeathed to us.